3

Step

  1. Administrative / data entry worker opens ?, loads raster image, and using a 'lasso-like' tool (a la Photoshop 'magnetic' if possible) specifies areas of interest / masks.

  2. ?

  3. Profit! (i.e., application opens raster image, vector file describing masks, does interesting stuff to areas of interest based on runtime context)

My question is "what do we use for steps 1 and 2 ? "

  • Primary goal is to reduce the time required to complete Steps 1 and 2 (the 'mechanical Turk' part of the process).
  • Strictly secondary goal is the ease of parsing / using the vector format describing the areas of interest / masks in step 3.

Water cooler conversation:

'Sheesh, there's got to be some Flash component that does this!"

"What about GIMP?"

"If we have to put C or C++ programmers on it, it's not going to be a good investment...."

"But what if it only takes a day or two?" "Nothing takes just a day or two," ....

For prototyping, the obvious route is Photoshop -> Illustrator -> SVG.

But if there's a framework / library / editor that could make the 'lasso' coding and vector-file generation easy, it might tip the scales in favor of writing a custom editor.

Is there such a framework / library / editor?

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Larry OBrien
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  • Question: why does the output have to be a vector file? Any operation taken on a raster image is most likely to generate a raster output. Generating a vector is probably an extra step, and one that loses data rather than gaining it. – Mark Ransom Nov 13 '08 at 23:25
  • +1 for step 1/2/3 :) And if my info would help, I solved the same problem by using OBJ (Alias|Wavefront). But I implemented parsing myself (it was 1998, I think...) – avp Apr 24 '09 at 07:39

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